Business reporting should be about telling people what they need to know, not what they want to know.
That’s not businesses are buying. Sad. It’s not what they’re getting, either.
Too many businessmen only want their egos massaged, and their political inclinations confirmed. This is true when it comes to reporting, my own field, where we have Forbes, Fortune, Business Insider, and a host of other Republican-leaning publishers spinning the news. It’s doubly true for CNN and CNBC. The latter has an on-staff “wealth reporter” specifically hired to fluff the egos of his betters.
Sadly, it’s also true for economists, those “experts” hired by big banks and brokerages to figure out where things are headed.
Over the last month I’ve been treated on TV to a parade of so-called financial experts, each one confidently predicting that a recession is imminent, that it’s baked in, that it will likely be severe. These jamokes have insisted this will end the drive for working from home, that it will end demands for higher pay, that it will bring employees crawling on their knees to their bosses for a crust of bread, a revived dress code, and a two-hour daily commute.
It was all bullshit. It was spin. It was politics. It was telling people what they wanted to hear.
The evidence is in. GDP grew 2.4% in the last quarter. The economy isn’t slowing. It’s speeding up.
Want to know why? I’ll tell you.
It’s because the Biden Plan worked, and it’s continuing to work.
This plan came in two parts.
Part One was the American Rescue Plan. This puts money into peoples’ pockets. It gave folks the wherewithal to get through the pandemic without getting pushed into the street. It did for ordinary people what the Trump tax cuts, and the PPP scams, did for the wealthy. It made them whole.
Unlike the rich, who tossed their largesse onto a bonfire of speculations like Bitcoin, ordinary people put that money into the bank, or their retirement account, and got through the worst of it. Since then, they’ve been using that cushion to keep the economy on track.
Part Two was the Inflation Reduction Act. This was a business stimulus, aimed in the directions business needs money to go, if we’re to save the planet. Renewable energy. Electric cars. A supply chain less dependent on the whims of Xi Jinping, Vladimir Putin, or the Saudi sheikhs. That money is now being matched by private investment, producing a huge, and growing, business investment boom.
Will those investments get a financial return? Maybe. For some. Depends on how things go, which is the way business investment works.
Will it get an environmental return? Will it get a national security return? You bet. That’s already happening. That’s on top of the financial return that lets the Fed make money cost money and (by the way) gives boomers the chance to invest our nest eggs in instruments with a 5% return, a glide path into a prosperous old age.
It’s time we demand these economists apologize for getting it wrong. It’s time for some of them to go off into the booming Biden economy and look for work. It’s time businesses started listening to what they should know, rather than what soothes their limitless egos.
Oh, and it’s time for them to give back the tax cuts that didn’t work. We have a deficit to pay.
